The Bloodless Boy Page 3

  Oldenburg lifted the candle, and rested it carefully down onto the desk’s surface. He opened the lid of the box.

  His correspondences drew together hundreds of natural philosophers, mechanics and experimentalists. Famous in elaboratories and workshops across Europe and the New World, he had advanced the design of the Royal Society: to take to task the whole Universe, unfettered by partisan zeal, devoted only to truth and human welfare.

  Pulling away the pistol from its box, Oldenburg opened the pan and blew into it softly. The weight of the weapon, a relic from the Civil Wars, caused a tremor in his elbow. He poured in the priming powder and replaced the cover. He blew away the loose grains. He tipped powder into the muzzle, and reached again into the box. He inspected the ball, an imperfect sphere of lead, then dropped it down the muzzle. Hearing its sibilant slide, the click of its landing, he pushed in the wadding with the scouring stick.

  He listened to Pall Mall and Westminster, to the sounds of the morning. The rain falling. The sash window rattling in the wind. He observed the line of dawn sky brightening between the curtains.

  He tried to stand, but his legs would not respond. So, remaining in his chair, he lit the match and placed it in the cock. He blew on the match, opened the pan, turned the barrel towards himself and with barely a pause pulled the trigger.

  The explosion sent the ball clean through the front and back of his skull.

  At the roar of the pistol Dora-Katherina screamed, and ran from her bedchamber.

  She saw the powder-charred skin of his face, his expression stilled at the moment of the shot.

  The blood pumping from the wound.

  The candle’s flame, guttering in the draught from the window.

  Britannia looking up from the arm of the chair, impassive to the act she had witnessed.

  These impressions squeezed chaotically into Dora-Katherina’s mind, sending it reeling, bringing her the sensation of a painful shrinking, a narrowing to a point.

  Her legs folded. She had to kneel. Her cries were harsh, a vixen’s shriek. She held her hands imploringly towards Heaven.

  Her beloved Henry was dead.

  Observation III

  Of Infusion

  The yellow wallpaper of the drawing room made for a startling contrast with the view through the window, the wet slate colour of the sky over Bishopsgate, and the anaemia of the falling snow.

  More strong colours fought for domination. A crimson rug leaked between the legs of blue wooden chairs. Their orange seat covers, imported grogram, clashed with the cerise of the table. At the windows hung purple velvet curtains, reaching to the floor. Sturdy linings reinforced their fabric for the nights when Robert Hooke required complete darkness. A vase of Christmas roses, placed at the table’s centre by Mary Robinson the housekeeper, added bright whites and pinks.

  Never afraid to make himself the subject of his own experimentum crucis, Hooke had chosen the colours for medicinal effect, to nourish his weak frame. Constructing with Harry a half-scale model of a gliding machine, he had suggested that such retinal stimulation might hinder the choking of his nerves, and discourage black bile.

  Everything about Hooke’s appearance, on the other hand, was grey. He sat near the fire, trying to warm after his return from the Fleet to his rooms at Gresham’s College. His skin was pallid and lustreless. His grey hair, prone to breaking off, was now tied back with a charcoal-coloured ribbon. His silver eyes, which never settled, zig-zagged about the objects in his drawing room.

  The drawing room also served as Hooke’s elaboratory. The table behind him was covered by his plans and constructions for demonstrations at the weekly meeting of the Royal Society. His large diary, detailing his busy life, weather observations, the precarious state of his health and medications used to improve it, his finances and experimental ruminations, lay open across them, next to his microscope.

  A glass-fronted cabinet displayed his collection of fossils, the traces of creatures long since disappeared from the Earth; many from the cliffs near his childhood home on the Isle of Wight, some from excavations for buildings in London, given to him by the workmen who knew of his interests. Clocks stood everywhere about, most disembowelled, their innards spilt as if Hooke sought to anatomise the grand complication of time itself. Stalagmitic piles of books grew from the floor. Inserted into them were hundreds of loose sheets, observations written across them in his tiny scrawl. More books filled the shelves lining the whole of one wall.

  All his tools were organised on a large board, each with its own place, either hanging from a nail or on a small shelf. This neatness was not their natural state of rest. Harry had designed the system when he was Hooke’s apprentice, and their temporary discipline was due to the previous morning’s hunting and sorting by his replacement, young Tom Gyles.

  A door led up to Hooke’s observational turret, which housed a pair of his larger telescopes, and his selesnoscope. Harry used to sit up there with Hooke, both of them wrapped in blankets, sipping hot chocolate.

  Now it was Tom who learned the mysteries of the constellations, the names of stars and planets, and the mysterious attractions between them. The boy, just ten years old and already apprenticed, sat in amongst Hooke’s things, mixing plaster for a model of the surface of the moon. ‘I shall blow air through the plaster, from beneath the model, before it has set,’ he explained to Harry, smearing plaster across his forehead, ‘to emulate its craters.’

  For five years this was my place as much as Mr. Hooke’s, Harry remembered, feeling an unsettling nostalgia for times spent at the table, or crouched on the same bit of floor that Tom now occupied, shaping, carving, brazing, gluing. Now he came by invitation, and the tools he knew so well subtly altered to his perception. He had his own workshop, his own tools, and his own methods of taxonomy and keeping to hand.

  Grace Hooke, visible through a doorway, stood in the kitchen, as Mary enticed a hare to leave its skin with a pull of her forearm. Its pelt slid from the animal, a sheath of pink-lined fur; a satisfying ripping sound accompanied her movement. The two spoke quietly, laughing often, but Harry could hear little of their conversation. Grace had the habit of talking behind her hand, secretively, and so it was impossible to guess at the topic.

  ‘How go the springs, Mr. Hooke?’ Harry enquired of him, but surreptitiously watching her. Hooke’s niece was too grand for him – she had been engaged to marry the Lord Mayor Sir Thomas Bloodworth’s son, until Sir Thomas had intervened. ‘Will you be ready with your paper?’

  An expensive education paid for by her uncle, and the manners of a lady. No thoughts for a lowly Observator.

  Hooke grunted at him. ‘I have stopped setting times for such things, Harry. I hope to have it in Philosophical Transactions soon enough.’

  On the floor between them was a wooden stand, simply constructed, a cross-member extending from its head. A copper spring wound around a cylinder, twisted at the lower end into a claw, hung from it. A pile of brass weights sat by.

  Hooke’s tone was despairing. ‘I have considered the spring-like behaviour of the air; a man might fly on the end of a sound-spring, but how would such a craft appear? I am too bogged in fantasy. My tendency is to dwell upon such thoughts instead of the writing of my results. I am like a cripple climbing stairs, my progress slow and painful to observe.’

  ‘And the world intrudes as ever, Mr. Hooke. Sir Edmund’s man will be here presently.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Hooke said wearily. ‘Come closer by the fire yourself. Mary has prepared me an infusion of catmint to fend off the rheum. Somewhere I have some steel wine. It is no wonder that my understanding of this world proceeds so slowly. Do my headaches and voidings of jelly signal the slipping of my faculties?’

  Hooke took any medicine described to him by helpful associates, and had never yet found health. Harry skilfully kept him away from expounding further upon his ailments by offering to write an account of the meeting at the Fleet. ‘We will be asked pertinent questions should there ever be
a trial,’ he said.

  Harry called Tom over to the window, and instructed him to watch for Sir Edmund’s man. Tom carefully carried the board with his section of lunar surface, and some tube to blow through, as the plaster was starting to stiffen.

  Hooke brought across the pan of steaming green liquid, and carefully poured it into a bowl. The bowl had a chip on its rim, which he avoided; it would not have occurred to him to replace it. He took a chest-full of the steam before swallowing any of the catmint.

  ‘It resembles that which it seeks to drain out, Harry, a happy coincidence of signatures auguring well!’

  Harry, his own clothes still damp, would have appreciated the offer of at least a sip of this tincture.

  *

  Hooke sat with his drink and stared up towards the ceiling. He achieved this by tilting back his chair and straightening his spine as far as possible, his stiff neck moving back with it. His eyes did not see joists and plaster, but recalled instead mud, snow, and the body of the boy.

  ‘To take the blood so completely is a difficult undertaking,’ he mused. ‘To infuse it into another is more difficult still. It demands knowledge of blood, and the course it takes about the body, its flow, its pulsation, of the fabric of its conduits, of its sticky coagulation and methods to prevent it stick. Of use of quills, capillary tubes, and funnels. Dr. Lower performed trials with dogs, infusing the blood of one dog into another. Mr. Coga survived, but had only small amounts infused. Professor Denis in France, some ten years ago, placed the blood of a calf into a man who had suffered from a frenzy. The man pissed out black urine, then died.’

  ‘He is the reason that the Society has forbidden the continuance of infusion.’

  ‘Yes, Viscount Brouncker our President put a stop to it.’

  ‘Witches are drained of their blood to take away their power,’ Harry observed.

  ‘It is not Christian to persecute superstitious people.’

  ‘There will always remain a broken line dividing religion, magic and philosophy. I test all things according to my own yardstick. You have taught me to do that, Mr. Hooke, over our years together.’

  For a moment the two natural philosophers of the Royal Society sat comfortably, quietly, enjoying this talk of blood. Hooke produced a pipe and some tobacco. Harry looked over at Tom, to check whether he found their conversation too grisly. The boy looked happy enough, blowing down a thick length of tube, forcing the almost-set plaster into strikingly crater-like forms.

  ‘What of Sir Edmund’s view, that the boy suffered a Papist murder?’ Harry asked. ‘The Catholics believe in transubstantiation, the changing of wine into the blood of Jesus, in their observance of the Eucharist.’

  Hooke inhaled deeply from the pipe, looking directly at his assistant. The smoke circled around him, catching the light, a halo missing its saint. ‘It is not my blood that makes me an Anglican, Harry. It is my childhood, my history, and that of my parents. It is learnt; it is not a thing innate. The Royal Society dictates modesty of aim and expression. We depend neither on Revelation, nor Epiphany. Too many before have used this pretence. We have learnt through this century how such dogmatisers hold a grip on our imaginations, urging men to unpardonable acts.’

  ‘And yet belief has been shown to alter the flesh,’ Harry persevered. ‘To be brought up a Catholic is to be brought up to believe. Belief in a cure, for example, may lead to recovery, ’though nothing medicinal resides within the palliative. Sailors tell of voodoo spells of the Western Indies, where to tell a man that he is dead is enough to kill him, and then to show him that he can live again is enough to revivify him.’

  ‘Perhaps, then, Sir Edmund’s fears are not to be so easily dismissed. We are left with the questions: Why was this boy murdered? Why was his blood taken? How was it used? If for infusion, into whom was it infused?’

  ‘And who killed him?’ Harry added simply.

  ‘The Justice kept the letter left on the body. I am sure that will tell us all.’

  ‘Not if he chooses to keep it from us. The eeler-man spoke of seeing just numbers.’

  ‘I will not speculate, Harry, with such little information. I have only imagination.’

  Hooke used the word as if it were something to despise. Harry fell silent, seeing again the boy lying in the snow, seeming to be pushed up from the earth. His mouth began to water again, his own imagination making his nausea return.

  The noise of Tom Gyles disturbed them, as he dropped his model onto one of the piles of books, which rocked perilously before finally settling.

  ‘A carriage arrives, Mr. Hooke,’ he announced.

  Observation IV

  Of Presentation

  One of Sir Edmund’s horses released a piss stream into the snow, a hot fog rising behind it. His man, Welkin, rested his arms over the handles of the tumbrel, summoning the strength for another push. A crust of snow worked into the folds of his coat. His face shone from the effort of bringing down the trader’s tumbrel from the carriage, tied on it the body of the boy, covered by a cloth.

  He was older than Harry expected, and looked too frail to be doing such business in such weather.

  ‘The Justice is delayed,’ Welkin managed. ‘He will come later for the anatomising.’

  Hooke had never agreed to an autopsy, only to store him in the Air-pump, as Sir Edmund well knew; Harry wondered how the Curator would respond.

  Together they steered the tumbrel around the College, no more talk between them, following the trail of Hooke’s footprints.

  This trail disappeared in front of a door. Hooke had left it unlocked; Harry took the lantern, already lit, hanging inside. He led Welkin down the stairway, into the maze of passages and cellar rooms spreading like roots beneath the College.

  Their boots slipped on the stone, and the lantern, suspended over Harry’s elbow, swung awkwardly before them.

  Welkin’s face showed no sympathy for the load that they carried, but he was the Justice’s man, and so quite used to the carrying of bodies, Harry supposed.

  He took a care to keep his own feelings from his face – so what did Welkin presume of him?

  Harry led him through a long, low corridor, under the brick arches supporting the floors above. They passed various doors, signifying rooms behind. Whatever else was kept inside them, the corridor itself was used as a storeroom; along its sides hung various tools and pieces of machinery, and more of Hooke’s models and machines, those that there was no room for in his rooms or in the College’s repository. Woods, hides, ropes and yarns, fabrics of all thicknesses, and different grades of papers, were boxed and stacked along the walls. Sacks of plasters, minerals, pigments and ores leaned against one another. With only the single light’s illumination, to navigate the tumbrel needed patience and determination. The flying machine, in which Harry had fractured a foot when making its maiden voyage across the quadrangle, was slung on the wall; they skirted around its frame, canvas, and the springs that powered its wings.

  The subterranean coolness was different in quality to the outside air; in the separate category of cold reserved for such places, which had never been warm and never would be.

  They went through a solid-looking iron-faced door going across the passage, heavy studs protruding from its surface. At the top of a short flight of rough wooden stairs, Harry called down:

  ‘Mr. Hooke?’

  ‘I am ready.’

  Harry gently placed his hands beneath the dead boy, and lifted him, carefully descending the few treads. The lack of blood made him light. They should not have been so overly fastidious as to bring him on the tumbrel, the effort more trouble than it was worth. Welkin followed him down the steps, and the three men stood in a tall narrow room, the floor dug down to give the height needed for the apparatus standing in its centre.

  This philosophical instrument left only a tight margin around the claustrophobic space to give the room to work it. Two bulky lamps hanging on opposite walls provided the means of seeing, their lights reflecting dully, g
lancing off glass and brass.

  The apparatus was the Machina Boyleana, more commonly referred to as the Air-pump, sometimes as the Pneumatical Engine. Robert Hooke and his patron Robert Boyle had used it to investigate the properties of air, and its absence.

  Its base was a bulky frame of oak; two equilateral triangles at right angles to one another formed a skeletal pyramid. On it sat a hollow globe fabricated from thick glass. This was the receiver. The thickness of the glass varied slightly across its surface – viewing Robert Hooke through it, Harry observed a grotesque version of him, his bent form exaggerated, features and limbs stretched into impossible curves.

  The top of the receiver was cut away, a glass lid fitting the gap. Through this aperture experimental apparatus could be placed. The globe, as Hooke had suggested at the Fleet, was just large enough to hold the boy, and its aperture was wide enough to lower him through.

  From the lower part of the receiver, a thick brass tube, with a stopcock key protruding, joined another brass cylinder. This had inside it the sucker, a wooden cylinder with a thick piece of leather glued to its top, the leather completing the necessary tightness of fit inside the tube. A rotating handle driving a rack and pinion forced this piston up and down, to clear the receiver of air.

  Welkin coughed, and held out a note to the Curator. ‘A missive for Mr. Hooke,’ he said gruffly. ‘From Sir Edmund.’

  Hooke took it from him, and nodded to Harry for him to lead Welkin back out.

  The man bade Harry a curt farewell, and walked to the Justice’s carriage. Harry took a draught of the Bishopsgate air, and turned back for the cellars, relocking the outer door. He returned through the corridor to the Air-pump, where Hooke had unwrapped the cloth covering the boy.

  *

  Harry climbed onto a small stool placed next to the apparatus, and Hooke gently lifted the boy to him. Rigor mortis had long relaxed its grip upon the body, and the boy’s arms and legs splayed loosely. Harry perceived with a jolt how thin and fragile the boy was.